Court Report
For Texte zur Kunst, I wrote a review on Radha D’Souza’s and Jonas Staal’s Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC) at Framer Framed in Amsterdam.
Here is an excerpt:
“One of the CICC’s main gestures is its critical inversion of the operative legal system undergirded by anthropomorph corporations and states – less by including non-human life forms into such legal systems by ascribing rights to nature (as in the example of Ecuador’s and Bolivia’s constitutional amendments in 2008 and 2012, respectively) than by contesting the very anthropocentric and property-based principles of law (as epitomized in the liberal discourse of the Rights of Man inherited from the Enlightenment). The artistic détournement of the “social form” of the tribunal, as Claire Bishop has called it, is, of course, far from an unfamiliar genre – neither in contemporary art nor in the so-called “modern” history of art. Since at least the Paris Dada enactment of the so-called Barrès Trial in 1921, the performative play of judges and juries within the setting of an alternative courtroom has served as an effective artistic strategy for provoking public discourse. Of course, the sine qua non of such subversions of the social form of the tribunal – and the gesturing toward the history of popular tribunals this involves – is the (re)inscription into the social form of the art institution. If this could be said to be a constitutive contradiction of much contemporary art engaged with the tribunal form, the CICC seems to parse out the critical potentialities and implications of such a practice in an exemplary manner. Translating some of D’Souza’s “theoretical models into spatial morphologies,” it not only spatializes and gives form to the violent structuring and distribution of legal agency, victims, and ecocide in deep pasts, presents, and futures. Enacting a more-than-human tribunal, the assembly of the CICC also turns the art space into what theorist Marina Vishmidt has termed an “infrastructural critique”: an expanded collaborative, transdisciplinary, and alter-institutional art practice supported by the court installation in which artists, activists, academics, progressive judges, and social and Indigenous movements resided.”
Tobias Dias 